Hanging Out With Fred Johnson, Senior Marketing Manager for Professional Photography at Adobe

I spent a good chunk of Friday lunch and afternoon hanging out with Fred Johnson from Adobe. For those of you who don’t know Fred, he is the Senior Marketing Manager for Professional Photography at Adobe and a hell of a nice guy. In addition to being responsible for Professional Photography at Adobe, Fred also handles outside marketing for Adobe’s Lightroom product. I bet a few of you use that software huh? He’s also a photographer and blogger himself.

Fred and I talked a lot about where photography and professional photograpy are headed at Adobe. I can’t give any of the details (yet, but stay tuned), but we had a great conversation about Adobe’s Lightroom product, that Fred helps manage, and where things are headed with the new upcoming release. We also talked a lot about Flickr and Zooomr and blogging and social media and podcasting and all the great ways that Fred is out there looking to engage the photographic community.

I think it’s really cool that Fred is out meeting with bloggers and social media types in addition to the mainstream press. Not only that though, Fred is also out there hanging out and learning the ways that some of the very top talent are using Adobe products. Here’s a write up on Fred’s blog where he recently spent some time hanging out with my Pal Merkley. Although I process every single image that I shoot, I am nowhere near being able to do the kind of post processing magic that guys like Merkley or Kelly Castro (who also works at Adobe) are doing.

One of the coolest parts of Fred’s job is that he gets to see a lot of the super interesting behind the curtain research stuff that Adobe is working. We talked about the new 3D camera that was in the news earlier this year where by using multiple sensors and capturing multiple focal points new prototype cameras can allow photographers to adjust the focus field of a photograph after it’s already been taken and is out of the camera. Marc Levoy showed Robert Scoble and I some similar research that Stanford is doing on this type of photography last year.

In addition to getting to know a lot of the people in the photography community Fred’s also very involved online himself. In addition to Fred’s blog, you can find him on Flickr here, on Twitter here, and believe it or not he’s even already on FriendFeed.

Nice hanging out with you Fred and looking forward to the upcoming release of Lightroom 2.0 and all the other great things coming from Adobe. Thanks for taking some time on Friday to hang out and brief me on Adobe and Lightroom!